Bluetooth is here! Except, er, it’s not really here, but it sure makes for great marketing opportunities. InfoWorld reports that Motorola has started shipping a new phone with Bluetooth capability. The key word here is capability: The phone, which sells for $350 and is only available in a select few U.S. markets, doesn’t include Bluetooth out of the box. For that, you’ll need to shell out another $299 for a Bluetooth connectivity kit. Instead of calling this model the Timeport, perhaps Motorola should have named it the Don’t Bother.

“If there’s a stereostype for a hacker, Jay Beale isn’t it.” CNET News.com interviews Jay Bealle, the 26-year old computer security consultant and leader of the Bastille Linux Project.

The DeCSS court battle could change more than just the way you play DVDs. CMP’s Informationweek says what’s really at stake is the ability to innovate and conduct business in a digital world.

How the worm turns: Slashdot posts a somewhat interesting reader submission that seeks help with finding a stolen computer infected with the Sircam virus. The reader asks: “Any way to track this guy via email, or even an ip or something
stored in the virus code itself? And if I do find him, do I send the cops, or just my
6-foot-4, 260-lb ex-eastern-block buddy Radek?”

LinuxJournal editor Doc Searls files his first report from the O’Reilly Open Source Conference, taking place this week in San Diego, Calif. The Craig Mundie/Michael Tiemann debate scheduled for Thursday is the main event for this show, and Searls does a good job of recapping the events of the past few months that led up to the debate.

– By Grant Gross –
Updated 8:18 p.m. EST –

The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced late Wednesday its representatives will meet with the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California this Friday in attempt to free jailed Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov.

“EFF will make a good faith attempt at negotiations aimed at dropping all charges against Dmitry Sklyarov and securing his immediate release from jail,” the organization said in a brief press release Wednesday evening.

If the EFF’s negotiations don’t work, look for more protests, with protesters taking on the U.S. government, instead of Adobe. While the next round of protests is still in the discussion stage, the free-sklyarov email list continues to generate dozens of messages a day.

C. Scott Ananian, organizer of a Boston protest last Monday and press contact for freesklyarov.org, says many of those who organized the first protests last Monday are aiming for a July 30 protest to coincide with the U.S. Senate confirmation hearings of Robert Mueller, who President George W. Bush has nominated to head the FBI. Mueller is now the U.S. Attorney in charge of Sklyarov’s prosecution. The same people who brought you BoycottAdobe.com, for the software company’s cooperation with the FBI in the Sklyarov case, are now running RejectMueller.com.

The mistrust of the EFF’s tactics by members of the free-sklyarov email list seems to have dissipated when Abode called for Sklyarov’s release this week after meeting with EFF representatives. The EFF, which had originally helped organized the first round of protests, backed off when Adobe agreed to meet.

“I suppose that most of the local organizers will fall in behind the EFF if they propose a concrete ‘next action’ date,” says Ananian. “Boston is committed to continuing action to free Sklyarov, one a week, if necessary, until he is freed.”

Sklyarov was arrested after presenting a paper at Def Con in Las Vegas last week. He allegedly violated the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which which outlaws the practice of making programs to circumvent copyright protections. Sklyarov’s supposed crime was developing software that allows buyers of eBooks, the copyrighted digital book format created by Adobe Systems, to back up eBook files or view them on unsupported platforms, such as Linux.

Meanwhile, more than 6,000 people have signed the Open Source Community Declaration of Support for Sklyarov, announced by Chris DiBona, an employee of NewsForge owner OSDN/VA Linux, on July 20.

Other Open Source/Free Software groups have pitched in as well. The GNU-Darwin distribution project had been supporting the former Adobe boycott by pointing out free alternatives, says the project’s Michael L. Love, and the project will continue to support the movement’s focus on the prosecution in the case.

The Register reports: “RSA Security is running a factoring challenge that offers would-be code breakers a
prize of up to $200,000 for finding the two numbers of the kind used to create
ultra-secure 2048-bit encryption key.”

At NetBSD.org: “A buffer overflow existed in the telnetd(8) program. Any client
connecting could cause the telnetd instance to SEGV, and possibly
to execute arbitrary code as root.”

ZD’s Net Developer section has information about Apache Portable Runtime, a library of C functions that make C programs portable to different platforms.

The Register reports that a denial of
service vulnerability has cropped up in Microsoft’s Service for Unix 2.0.